Unsafe city

The first time I came to New York, I supposed, without examining the question too closely, that it was probably the most dangerous city I had known. I walked a block from my hotel and couldn't help thinking that I was lucky not to have been immediately killed. Later that day, I wondered why, if life was quite so dangerous, there was anybody on the streets at all. They looked calm and purposeful enough. Why weren't they all running for cover?

They weren't running for cover, it turned out, because Fifth Avenue in Midtown was not the kind of place people meant when they said New York was dangerous. It was a precept among the journalists with whom I had worked that it always pays to ask, and the first thing I did - provoking some mirth - was to ask where and what the danger was in Manhattan.

Looking back, I realised that this predisposition to think of New York as dangerous was part of my religious heritage: I had listened to sermons and the accounts of evangelicals, I had listened to the stories of the missionaries and the work of the church in Harlem. They had represented the place as a kind of frontier state for the work of the Lord. Later, West Side Story had made that mortal danger glamorous.

The West Side of West Side Story has long since disappeared under development, and for the past few years a process has been under way that will do something similar for Harlem. The brownstones are being snapped up and "gut-renovated". The vacant lots are all ear-marked for development. I saw a printed notice, the other day, telling people not to sit on the stoop - the front steps - of a grand old Harlem house. It seemed profoundly un-American, as if, somewhere in the Midwest, one were to see notices on the porches forbidding the use of rocking chairs.

For reasons to do with work, we have been looking to swap a small apartment in New York for something more spacious, which is why I found myself sitting around on various Harlem stoops, tracing what had happened to the decorative details of cornices, from one house to the next. I was watching how a beautiful ornamental line had been modernised over, on one building, only to re-emerge, restored and lovingly picked out in fresh paint, a few doors down.

I could see I was getting out of my depth. Inside these century-old houses, there was once a plethora of decoration, oak-wainscoting and mahogany stairs, "pocket doors" that slid away into a recess, or acted as room-dividers. There were powder rooms with marble basins communicating with the bedrooms. And, most characteristic and least familiar in Europe, the ceilings were made of pressed tin sheets, with ornamental cornices also in metal, their patterns gradually softened, as the details of stucco are softened in London, by accumulated layers of paint.

I saw one such house, abandoned and waiting, which had something of everything from the period of its original construction. In the kitchen, there was still a wood-burning range. The bedrooms still had their furniture and some of their old net curtains, the powder rooms, their marble basins. The ground floor still boasted its elegant tin ceilings. But the further up you ventured, the more it became clear that the roof had, essentially, gone, and the place was open to the elements.

It had belonged to a preacher, and the preacher had left it to his nephew, and the nephew had lived in it alone and it had all got too much for him. Someone, clearly responsive to the inherent grandeur of the parlour floor (the first floor in English terms, the one reached from the front door at the top of the stoop), had placed mirrors along the panelled walls. That had been perhaps the last great imaginative gesture on the decorative front, and it was, in its doomed optimism, magnificent.

You may well admire what happens eventually to such interiors, if your heart warms to the words "a wealth of exposed brick". For some reason, in Upper Manhattan, the reigning aesthetic demands that what is retained from the age of ornament (fireplaces, panelling, decorative metalwork) is balanced by some brutalist gesture - rough concrete walls in the children's bedroom, at least one exposed brick wall in the sitting room - so that the owners can live reassured that they are postmodern, not simply ignorant of the true principles of taste. Ornament is still a crime. The hideous brick interior walls must be a kind of plea in mitigation.

Those who believe that you can only live in SoHo or Tribeca, or even the Upper West Side, can be absolutely adamant that Manhattan ends at 125 St, the heart of Harlem. Any further north is social death. "There's nothing up there," is a common way of putting it. There are no restaurants or shops. There are no schools. None of your friends will visit you. No yellow taxis want to go there and there are none up there to bring you back.

Suppose you want to deflect some of the social horror that is about to come your way, if you make the decision to venture north, I've noticed there are simple tricks to make an area sound interesting and worthwhile. The extreme north end of Manhattan is called Inwood. You say: "Inwood's a nice location. I know a bunch of musicians who found places there." To be perfectly honest, I haven't exactly been to Inwood - the Cloisters Museum at Fort Tryon Park is the furthest north I know. But if it were strictly true (which it is not) that I knew a bunch of musicians happily ensconced in Inwood, then that would be the end of the argument.